


Pandora's Playthings

by JaneTurenne



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-02
Updated: 2011-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-18 21:22:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTurenne/pseuds/JaneTurenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pandora has been toying with the genetics of the Time Lord race for millennia.  This time, she may have met her match.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pandora's Playthings

It isn't so much, Narvin thinks, that he hasn't been _able_ to sleep. It's that there's not sleeping, and there's not sleeping, and to be perfectly frank, Narvin would prefer the other kind.

The dreams start in darkness, as dreams ought to do, but the woman's voice that begins them is strange, harsh and far too clear for dreaming. _You are mine, Narvin,_ she says to him. _My bloodline. My chosen. After these long millennia, my future is nearly come; the road through the darkness is almost ended. And you, Narvin—it is you who will take the final step, the final act of creation. I will have my perfect vessel._

If that were all, Narvin wouldn't mind so much. They're hardly what he'd call pleasant dreams up to then, true, but disembodied messianic murmurs aren't nearly enough to keep the Coordinator of the CIA awake at night. It's what comes _after_.

He supposes it would feel like being a bumbling boy at the Academy again, if he'd permitted himself such mental indiscipline even at that age. As it happened, he didn't. Even as an adolescent, he didn't fall asleep to visions of bright robes slipping off of smooth, pale skin—acres and acres of skin, far more naked skin than one petite Time Lady could possibly possess. He didn't ever used to dream of endless waves of golden hair fanning around a familiar face, flushed red with desire, teeth gleaming bright as she bit her lip in his imagination. He didn't hear a well-known voice calling his name, again and again, interspersed now and then with a moaned ' _please_ ,' in a plaintive tone very, very different from her usual air of scornful command. And he's fairly certain that even if he _had_ been subject to such dreams at any earlier stage of his life, his subconscious wouldn't have ever dared to choose the Lady President of Gallifrey for the starring role.

If Romana ever finds out, she's going to have him _vaporized_.

The first time it happens, he applies every bit of his CIA training to pretending it hasn't. He forces himself to go calmly back to sleep, and by the next night he has practically made himself forget. He might _actually_ forget, except that he has precisely the same dream again on that second night, and this time he wakes up in a cold sweat, and immediately dashes off in search of an even colder shower.

It's overwork, that's all. Stress. It doesn't mean anything, except that he sees far too much of the Lady Romana these days. He'll just do his job better. He'll work even harder. He'll anticipate his President's every desire...that is, her every need...her every _political_ purpose, and then he won't need to speak to her at all. Ever. Not that it will matter if he does, because this is all some bizarre fluke, and he has more than self-control enough to stop it ever happening again. But just to be sure, he heads straight in to the office, middle of the night be damned, and attacks the pile of case files on his desk with single-minded vengeance. By the time he falls exhausted into bed the following night, he's pinpointed the locations of three previously unaccounted-for renegades, uncovered and arrested a seditious plotter among the Chancellery Guard, and foiled a ring of chronal smugglers operating out of Gryben. It's the best day's work he's done in years.

That night, he's in the dream _with_ Romana, and things get a great deal more...hands-on. By the time he wakes up, he certainly does need a shower, but it's too late for cold to make any difference one way or the other.

After that, Narvin gives up on sleeping altogether.

Four days without so much as a wink of sleep gives a man a good deal of time for thinking, though he feels his reasoning grow fuzzier with each unrestful night. Still, he's a rational man, and the question of 'why her' is obvious enough to occur to him no matter how exhausted he may be. He doesn't seem to recall ever finding himself particularly attracted to her before, but then again he doesn't find himself particularly attracted to _anyone_ , really. Attraction is a conscious process, only actualized when one chooses to pay attention to it, and it's not impossible that he's been subconsciously aware of her for a very long time. It would be stupid of him to try to deny that Romana _is_ physically pleasing, if one cares about that sort of thing. And she does happen to be incredibly self-confident. And strong. And intelligent. She's the center of any crowd, a natural focus of attention, and not only because of her rank. It wouldn't be entirely inaccurate to say that he's never met another Time Lady like her. He may find her a little bit magnificent when she's in a temper. He may like her even better when she smiles.

Thank Rassilon she hates him, or he might actually consider letting himself _care_.

After four nights of sleeplessness, Narvin finds himself on the wrong end of a stun blast, and it's a mark of how much of a mess his life has become that he considers it a blissful respite. When he wakes, he is informed that his sleeplessness has been a result of the Pandora creature piggybacking his brainwaves, but that this bout of enforced unconsciousness ought to break her hold. Apparently, something in his genes made him particularly susceptible to such attack ( _my bloodline, my chosen_ , he hears). Apparently, Pandora has been playing merry havoc with the biology of the Time Lord race for millennia. Apparently, both he and Romana are products of her program of genetic meddling. Apparently, in fact, they two are the end of a very long line of selective Time Lord breeding.

The rest of the inner circle of Gallifrey knows that much. But only Narvin knows about the dreams. And so he's the only one in a position to add two and two, and realize that it almost certainly doesn't equal five. He has a sneaking suspicion that he has just figured out exactly what Pandora's 'final act of creation' was supposed to be.

Everyone else has drawn the wrong conclusion about when Pandora's interference started: Narvin knows that he _has_ slept, and more than once, since first she started meddling with his thoughts, and that the idea that _she's_ been actively keeping him awake can't possibly be right. Braxiatel and the Lady President may also be wrong, then, in the supposition that Pandora will have vanished from Narvin's head the moment he lost consciousness. His first step is to return to the CIA and run every single test on himself that he can possibly think of, but the only brainwaves in his head are his own. He _thinks_ that the theory may have been fundamentally sound—that being stasered into a state of unconsciousness deeper even than sleep, too profound for Pandora to access, may have been enough to break her immediate hold—but he vows that he'll keep an exceptionally close eye on himself from now on. And in the meanwhile, he starts on the question of family trees.

He knows more or less what he's looking for, and so it doesn't take long. Sure enough, Narvin and Romana share a distant ancestor: an exceptionally brilliant Time Lord who just _happened_ to be a luminary in the government of the original Pandora. Since then, almost every forbear of both his and Romana's has been a genius of some stripe or another: the more conventional, respectable leaders tend to appear on Narvin's side of the equation, the great radical thinkers on Romana's. Their two genealogies diverge and reconnect more than once, and the products of both lines are the most famous (or, in some cases, notorious) Time Lords of all, each still greater than the one who came before. But it's been ten generations since the last intersection. Pandora seems to have been staking everything on one last throw, the great culmination of her project.

Narvin would almost be flattered at the idea of being chosen for such an august destiny, if he weren't absolutely _horrified_.

Narvin is a _Time Lord_ , a member of the proudest and most noble race in all the universe. He refuses to be used as some kind of _stud_ , as an _animal_ whose most important purpose is the dissemination (he flinches at the choice of word) of his own genetic heritage. He's outraged. He's incensed. He will _not_ have so personal an aspect of his lives decided by the whims of a disembodied millennia-old dictator.

Now, if he could only stop thinking of Romana, everything would be just fine.

*

Narvin admits that a coup attempt isn't exactly the least dramatic possible means of removing all temptation, but it is, at least, in character, and he honestly _doesn't_ agree with Romana's politics. If he can just get her quietly out of the way, out of the government, where he'll never have to lay eyes on her again, everything will be perfect. He won't make a pitiable laughingstock of himself, he'll keep his job, Romana will be perfectly safe and probably happier than she is now anyway. True, Darkel is repellent and conscienceless and loathsome in every way, but that's ideal, really. A President he can loathe would be highly, highly preferable to the situation he finds himself in now.

Naturally, the coup doesn't work. It very, very nearly works, and Narvin has no one but himself to blame for its failure. He doesn't know whether the voice in his head that screams to him that he can't let Romana die, he _can't_ let Romana _die_ , belongs to him, or to Pandora. He doesn't know which he wants it to be. Wherever the blame belongs, he rescues Romana from Darkel's bomb, and suddenly there's a civil war on. And that is very bad, and very good.

It's a distraction. That, at least, Narvin will say for war. It lets him lose himself in his work. But he's losing himself in his work among a very, very small group of colleagues, and one of them is the Lady Romanadvoratrelundar. They're together perpetually, these days, running for their lives together from one bolthole or safehouse or temporary base to the next. And he can't stop himself noticing her. He can't stop himself watching her. He can't stop himself protecting her. And he can't stop himself dreaming, though now the dreams don't feature a prelude from Pandora off the top, and he can't be at all certain that they're coming from outside.

He thinks it's just another dream, the first night at the Academy. He's just saved Romana's life yet again, in the Anomaly Vaults, and then spent hours trying to make this burnt-out wreck of a building secure enough to keep them all safe through the night. He should be sleeping, and instead he's trying to pretend he can't hear the Savage sniffling three rooms over as she quietly cries herself to sleep through eyes that will never see again, and nursing a head still aching from the explosion that nearly shattered his skull. He's absolutely exhausted, and it's really tremendously frustrating, now that he has finally dropped off, not to have a restful sleep waiting for him on the other end, to be subjected instead to some puerile fantasy of the Lady President, padding into his room on bare feet, and slipping onto the narrow mattress he's pushed into a corner of a burnt-out dormitory, and sliding under his thin blanket, and...

"Narvin."

He's standing straight up, back against the wall, fighting not to shout, before his brain fully processes the fact that he's awake, he's _awake_ and...

" _Narvin_ ," Romana says, again, and then she's standing too, and her body is pinning him against the wall, and her hands are in his hair, and she's kissing him.

It isn't gentle. It isn't tentative. It isn't an invitation, or a request. It's a demand in the shape of a kiss, from a woman who has always known precisely what she wants.

"I want you," she's whispering into his ear a moment later, like an echo from inside his own mind. Her hands are already pulling at his clothes, untying the drawstring of his simple sleeping trousers, pulling his shirt over his head.

"Madam President, I...we...stop! This is ridiculous, you don't...you can't..."

"I want you, Narvin," she repeats, and kisses his neck. Grabbing his hands, she guides them over her body, sliding them over her hips, her stomach, up to cup her breasts. "Please."

He makes a noise with far too many consonants in it and tries to pull his hands away, but she holds them tightly against her, and she's just run her tongue over his ear, and Rassilon....

"Romana," he says. "Wait. Look at me, Romana, tell me what...why..."

She does raise her head to look. Or he supposes she _would_ look, if she was capable. Her eyelids are open, but her eyes are darting back and forth in all directions, at incredible speed, in a way that makes his stomach churn to watch.

"Madam President," he says, urgently. "You're asleep. You're _asleep_ , Romana, wake..."

She interrupts him with another kiss, just as fervent as the first, and before he can react, she's kicked the legs out from under him. He lands hard on his back on the mattress.

"Ow! You could maybe take into account the fact that I'm just getting over a concussion, and..."

She's on top of him before he can say anything else, and kissing him again.

"Stop," he says. "Stop, _stop_ , you're going to _kill_ me for this when I wake up... I mean when _you_ wake up... Romana... Ah!"

She's just reached a hand down between his legs and administered a pleasantly firm squeeze. His eyes roll back in his head. "Oh, I am going to regret this," he mutters, and then sits up, and slaps her soundly across the cheek.

She stops dead, and blinks. And then she's focusing down on him, with lucid eyes.

They stare at each other, unmoving, for a very long moment. "Narvin," she says, "I think it would be in the best interest of your continued health for you to tell me what I'm doing here. Very, _very_ quickly."

"You were sleepwalking," he says. He takes a breath, and reminds himself who he is. He's the Coordinator of the CIA, not some moonstruck boy, and the woman in his lap hates him. If he doesn't take the attack, she'll get there first. "Apparently, you find me positively _irresistible_ in your sleep. It seems you just might have a sense of taste after all. Or your subconscious does, at least."

"Even my subconscious knows better than to go after _you_ , Narvin," she snaps, and rolls off of him, to sit beside his mattress on the floor. He hastily tucks the blankets around his waist. "This must have been..." She frowns. And then her eyes widen slightly. "Pandora!" she says. "Pandora was... She was talking in my head, and she wanted me to..."

"Oh, if _that's_ not the oldest excuse in the book," he says. "'The voices in my head made me do it?' Surely you can come up with a better reason than that."

"No," she says, still working it out. "No, it makes sense! She possessed you too, Narvin. Surely you haven't forgotten. You've got the Imperiatrix Imprimatur, just as much as I have. She must have wanted us... Ooooo, I'm going to _enjoy_ killing that woman." Romana's eyes are blazing. "Thinking she can use me as...as some kind of _genetic capital_...some kind of animal to be _bred_... Well, _that's_ never going to happen." She laughs, suddenly. "Unfortunate for her, isn't it?"

"Isn't what?" he asks.

"That we should have been the pawns in her endgame," she says. "She might so easily have ended up with two Time Lords who actually got along. It may have been quite easy for her in past generations, arranging her little matches. But she was bound sooner or later to run up against a pair of her chosen few who wouldn't touch each other with a ten foot pole." Romana gives a grim little smile. "Lucky for Gallifrey, that we can't stand each other."

"Lucky," says Narvin, flatly. "I've never felt so lucky."

"Oh, don't sulk, Narvin. I'm sure being woken up in the middle of the night by a beautiful woman in your bed isn't the _worst_ thing that's ever happened to you, even if you'd have preferred a different beautiful woman."

"I'd have preferred absolutely anybody else."

Her eyes flash. "Good," she says. "With your morals, I'd have worried how far you let things go before you bothered to wake me up, otherwise. I'd not have put it past you to..."

"Believe it or not, I don't find anything appealing in the notion of raping you in your sleep, no matter how willing you might seem."

"No," she agrees. "You don't find anything appealing in the notion of me at all."

"I'm sure it's a blow to your overinflated ego, Madam President, the idea that there might be one man in the Citadel who isn't falling over himself to have you, but..."

"Don't flatter yourself," she sneers. "As though I _care_ who you think about in your lonely little bed at nights."

"You would care," he says, "but fortunately, you aren't ever going to know."

"I don't have time to sit here and listen to you be cryptic all night," she says, standing. "I've got..." She stops, and looks at his clothes, lying in a pile by the wall.

"Narvin," she says, "You let me _undress_ you."

"You were very insistent on that point."

"But surely you could have stopped me before _that_."

"I didn't realize you were asleep, at first. You didn't exactly come out and tell me."

"So when I'm not asleep," she says, slowly, "you don't have any objections to me taking your clothes off?"

He opens his mouth, and then closes it. "I was half asleep myself," he says. "It took me a few microspans to be sure that _I_ wasn't the one dreaming."

Her eyebrows raise even further. "And do you frequently dream about me storming into your quarters in the middle of the night and tearing off your clothes?"

He swallows hard. "I may have...been having my own visits from Pandora," he says. "She's lived long enough to know that with a problem of this magnitude, it's generally better to attack from both sides."

"The voices in your head made you do it?" says Romana, in a strange voice, sitting back down, slowly. "Oh, if _that's_ not the oldest excuse in the book."

"What's your alternative explanation?" he asks. "That I'm actually...attracted to you?"

"Is that really so implausible?"

"You seemed to think so, a few microspans ago."

"I didn't have all the facts a few microspans ago."

"Even _if_ that were true," he says, not quite able to look at her, "why would I be such a masochist as to admit it to a woman who, in her own words, wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole?"

"And if you were saying it to a woman who used to believe she had you all figured out," she says, carefully, "and thought you hated her, and has been very...confused, since you've begun making a habit of saving her lives... Would you admit it then?"

He does look up at her, then. She's breathing just as hard as he is, and the same overwhelmed tangle of conflicting emotions that's rolling in his stomach is reflected in her eyes. "I would say that we're in the middle of a war," he says, "in a room without a locking door, and that your guards are bound to realize any minute that you aren't in your room, and go looking. I would point out that Pandora is still somewhere in your mind, and you can't be sure _what_ you feel, and we'd be giving her exactly what she wants..."

It isn't gentle. It isn't tentative. It isn't an invitation, or a request. It's a demand in the shape of a kiss, from a woman who has always known precisely what she wants.

"We wouldn't be giving her _exactly_ what she wants. I promise you, I have no desire whatever to provide Pandora with her next generation," Romana says, pulling her nightgown over her head in one smooth motion. "And yes, the circumstances are far from ideal, but they're only likely to get worse."

"There's still the question of..."

"This isn't Pandora controlling me, any more than she's controlling you. This is _my_ choice. This is _me_ , and this may well be the last chance we ever get." She's sliding into the bed beside him, naked skin to naked skin, and his hearts are beating so fast he wonders how his chest doesn't crack wide open. "So tell me, Narvin," she says, leaning forward until they're a hairsbreadth away from a kiss, "are you really going to waste it?"

*

There is, he learns that night, a third type of not sleeping. And this kind, it turns out, is the variety Narvin likes best of all.


End file.
